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Jury Duty

Today I fulfilled my civic duty and spent the day at the courthouse for jury duty. To be honest, I have never served jury duty before. When the papers arrived at my parents’ house, I was either away at college or overseas. There were no excuses this time, I had to go.

If you’ve never been to jury duty, you’ve never had the pleasure of hearing the judge welcome you and explain what a wonderful experience you are about to have. You also have not had the joy of watching the video which explains what jury duty is and is full of testimonials from people who have already completed their service.

Me being me, I had to write down a few of the quotes.

“Don’t worry if you get picked. You’ll be a part of an interesting process.”

“You need no special training to be a juror.”

“You will use your everyday common sense.”

It was described by one juror as a “deep and moving experience.”

Another said, “I felt good about myself.”

I’d like to believe that the process is all that. But I suspect that if the judicial system needs to go through the trouble of making a promotional video for serving on a jury duty, that the experience is far from moving and the process is not all that interesting.